Contents

Horlick's mother, Suzanna Czyzewska, was born in Warsaw in 1939. Czyzewska's parents fled to Russia when the Nazis invaded Poland, and when liberated, they fought with the British in the Middle East.[citation needed] After the war, they lived in Kenya, where Czyzewska was brought up. She moved to the UK when she was 19 and married Horlick's father when she was 21. After having two children, Nicola and then her brother Christopher, Czyzewska went to the Liverpool University School of Architecture and qualified as an architect. Horlick's father, Michael Gayford, was a Liberal candidate in the 1970s for Wirral. Horlick's parents lived in Puddington Old Hall, which is an historic Tudor house.

Between 1982 and 1983, Horlick worked for her father in the family business. She then joined S. G. Warburg & Co. as a graduate trainee in 1983, starting in the investment management business, which later became Mercury Asset Management. She was appointed a director in 1989. She joined Morgan Grenfell Asset Management in 1991 and was appointed Managing Director of the UK investment business in 1992 until 1997. During the period that she managed that business, assets under management rose from £4 billion[citation needed] to £18 billion. She was ultimately suspended from the job on Jan 14 1997 and resigned two days later, after it was claimed she was moving to a rival and trying to get colleagues to join her.[2][3]

She set up SG Asset Management in 1997 and Bramdean Asset Management LLP in 2005.[1] She is currently the Chairman of Rockpool Investments LLP and the CEO of Money&Co. She also has a film business called Derby Street Films. Nicola Horlick is the Chairman of film finance fund Glentham Capital which raised funds on equity crowdfunding platform Seedrs in 2013. Rockpool has its offices in Victoria and the other businesses are based in Mayfair.

Bramdean Alternatives, part-managed by Bramdean Asset Management LLP, had invested about 9 per cent of its assets (about £10m) with the US trader Bernard Madoff by December 2008. Horlick was not responsible for the hedge fund portfolio. This was managed by RMF, which was part of Man Group.[4] On 11 December 2008, Madoff was arrested and later charged with criminal securities fraud.[5] As a result, Bramdean shares lost a third of their value.[6] In an interview on the BBC's Today programme on the Monday following Madoff's fall, Horlick blamed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for the loss.[4]

Horlick has been called "Superwoman" in the media for balancing her high-flying finance career with bringing up six children, Georgina, Alice, Serena, Antonia, Rupert, and Benjie. Her eldest daughter, Georgina, died of leukaemia in 1998 when she was 12.[7][8]

She married Timothy Piers Horlick, whom she had met while at Oxford, in June 1984, when she was 23. They separated in December 2003 and divorced in 2005. Her second marriage is to Martin Baker, a financial journalist, on 8 September 2006. They had met in March 2005, when he interviewed her for the Sunday Telegraph.[9]